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It's been a while since last having anything to report on the OpenChrome project for providing open-source Linux graphics support for vintage VIA x86 graphics hardware. But it's still going and what is one of the only contributors left on the project has issued an update.

Independent developer Kevin Brace took over maintaining the OpenChrome DDX driver earlier this year to improve the open-source VIA Linux graphics support while over the summer he's slowly been getting up to speed on development of the OpenChrome DRM driver.

The open-source VIA/Chrome Linux graphics driver stack may not have an up-to-date DRM/KMS driver or working Mesa/Gallium3D driver, but the lone community developer left working on this code has continued to improve the DDX driver over the past few months.

The OpenChrome project has long aspired to having a mainline DRM/KMS driver but that original developer since left. These days OpenChrome is down to basically one developer left working on this open-source driver for VIA x86 graphics hardware.

While it's becoming increasingly harder to find VIA x86 hardware out in the wild and it's been a long while since last writing anything about VIA x86 Linux support, an independent developer is hoping to revive the OpenChrome VIA kernel mode-setting driver and ideally wants to see it mainlined in the Linux kernel.

Last week I wrote about a new Gallium3D driver under development for VIA Chrome hardware that was being done under the OpenChrome umbrella along with new work on the VIA DRM/KMS driver. I now have some answers from the developer about his plans for this open-source VIA graphics work under Linux.

While OpenChrome and the VIA DRM/KMS driver hasn't seen much public activity in quite some time and appears rather dead, apparently that's not the case. A new VIA OpenChrome Gallium3D driver was published this week in its initial rudimentary form.

There hasn't been much to report on in months for the OpenChrome DRM driver as there simply hasn't been any new public patches to comment on. While it sort of looked like this VIA DRM Linux driver was dead, it seems work is possibly getting resurrected on this open-source driver.

While open-source activities around Intel, AMD Radeon, and NVIDIA (Nouveau) hardware continues to flourish, for the unlucky users still dependent upon VIA x86 hardware, the OpenChrome and VIA kernel mode-setting initiatives seem to have come to a standstill.

In years past we long heard about lofty goals out of VIA Technologies for being open-source friendly and ultimately come up with a Mesa Gallium3D driver. We haven't heard anything officially out of VIA in a great number of months, but it turns out they do now have a Gallium3D driver for Chrome 9!

It's been several months since having anything to report on the state of VIA graphics under Linux. VIA hasn't been doing anything officially to better their Linux support and the "OpenChrome" development community is quite limited and small. While the long-in-development OpenChrome DRM driver for providing VIA kernel mode-setting support has yet to be merged into the mainline code-base, it's still being developed.

The xf86-video-openchrome DDX driver has been updated today with a version 0.3.0. Xavier Bachelot from the OpenChrome camp describes this release as "a major step forward for the openchrome X.org driver."

While fading away to irrelevancy, VIA is still around and actually releasing new hardware. Though this isn't some new VIA x86 quad-core CPU but rather VIA Technologies is now entering the ARM and Android space. The product they announced on Tuesday is a $49 Android PC.

Here's a video by James Simmons, the community developer that's near single-handedly been working on providing VIA kernel mode-setting (KMS) support and in-kernel memory management (via a GEM-ified TTM implementation), talking about the Linux KMS and GEM/TTM infrastructures for those wishing to learn more about Linux graphics driver programming.

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